Dennis Bergkamp

The Soccer Legend Who Transformed Arsenal

Bergkamp could hit an unmatched variety of balls into spaces that nobody else could see. His co-writer Winner once told me: “It's almost mathematical. It's something interior. He has this vision. And when he scores one of his goals or does one of his passes, you realize he's seen something that nobody else in the ground could have seen." It was as if he could see another dimension.

That’s true of the Bergkamp moments that millions of us will always remember: the instant flick with back to goal and then full-circle spin around Nikos Dabizas, of Newcastle United, followed by a goal; the loblet that placed Fredrik Ljungberg alone in front of Juventus’ goalkeeper; or his outside-of-the-foot strike against Argentina, at the World Cup of 1998. He found openings that even spectators high up in the best seats hadn’t spotted. Sometimes you had to rewind a move several times to work out what he had done. “Does Dennis Bergkamp have three feet?” asked Nick Hornby, novelist and Arsenal fan, during the weeks of Bergkamp’s greatest creative flowering, in the fall of 1997.

Thierry Henry notes that even in training at Arsenal, Bergkamp seemed to calculate the wind-speed when hitting every pass. Few players can see where teammates and opponents are at any given moment; Bergkamp could foresee where they would be a few moments hence. “I always had a picture in my head of how it would be in three seconds or two seconds,” he says. “I’d think, ‘He’s moving this way, and he’s moving that way, so if I give the pass with that pace neither of them can touch it because they are moving away from my line.” His former teammate Ian Wright, recalling the goal against Dabizas, tells Winner: “He’s an architect of space, so I reckon he’s done the drawings, measured everything and built it all in a split-second.”

Ricardo Ferri, Bergkamp’s teammate at Inter, carps that Bergkamp wasn’t a “decisive” player. This was arguably true. To achieve his great moments he sometimes appeared to enter a trance. Often, long swathes of the match would pass without his involvement. "People really have no idea what goes into the making of those goals like that," he once said. He didn’t want to be just another efficient, kilometer-eating, goal-scoring striker. He wanted to be Bergkamp. And happily, at Arsenal, unlike in Italy, fans and teammates didn’t seem to demand results every week. They were proud to have him at Highbury, indeed, in England. They had been waiting for him for a very long time.

Another key point: Soccer is an extremely body-conscious world. This is rarely stated outright, because many people in the game are afraid of sounding gay, but they responded in a primal way to Bergkamp’s beauty of movement. In the book, Wenger notes “a kind of aristocratic elegance in the way he walks.” Vieira says, “To make his kind of passes you have to like things to be perfect. I wouldn’t be surprised if at home his clothes are really well organized. I would not be surprised at all.”

Bergkamp ended up a member of Arsenal’s “Invincibles,” who went a record 49 games unbeaten until October 2004, and are often cited as the best club team in English history. But Arsenal’s last prize came in the FA Cup final against Manchester United in 2005. Eight trophy-less years later, reading this book feels like an evocation of a lost Arsenal, a time of miracles.

By the time Bergkamp retired, in 2006, only perhaps Wenger and Eric Cantona could make a claim as strong as his to having transformed English club soccer. Today, Bergkamp is a youth coach at his first club, Ajax Amsterdam, where he spends his days trying to teach teenage strikers to see space. He has no ambitions ever to be a manager.

Stillness and Speed has a habit of sending readers to YouTube, to see some long-ago pass all over again. Everyone has their own favourite Bergkamp moment. Bergkamp’s own is the time that his buddy, Arsenal’s chubby kit manager Vic Akers, was faux-casually leaning on a door at the training ground chatting up some sales girls. Akers clearly thought he looked pretty cool. Then Bergkamp snuck up behind him and — “whoosh!” — pulled down his shorts. Arsenal players were still laughing about the moment weeks later. “You know,” Bergkamp reflects, “I’ve won some trophies. And I’ve scored some nice goals. But this may be the highlight of my career.”